Stella, an archaeologist specializing in Anasazi culture, and David, a mysterious Navajo boy, are on the run from something terrifying. As they flee up into the snowy mountains of Colorado, they are carjacked by criminals. Caught in a blizzard, they must take refuge in what they believe is an abandoned cabin. It's at this cabin that they will face horrors beyond their imagination.

On a desolate beach in far northern Scotland, the winter storms have been washing up all manner of things since time began. But buried in the centre of one smaller iceberg is a shard of ancient Viking pottery telling a partial tale of a hidden mysterious island beyond the ice and mist, that was home to a great treasure and even greater horrors. Thawing in the same block of ice was a rotting flap of skin that refused to be identified but had similar skin patterns to a creature not seen for 100 million years.

Devil's Island. An abandoned island in the Caribbean Sea with a dark and bloody past. An island with a terrible secret. Nick Gorman, billionaire movie producer, assembles a team of ghost hunters and scientists to investigate the Thornhill Manor on Devil's Island - the most haunted place in the world that no one's ever heard of. He's there to find proof of ghosts, evidence of an afterlife...but he's also there to uncover the secret that is hidden on the island...to possess it.

Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook. As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life.

Sani Natonaba's ancestors have lived in these canyons for more than 700 years, but they aren't the only ones. When he awakens to the bleating of his family's sheep being slaughtered, he learns that something is stalking this isolated corner of the reservation, a predator unlike any he has encountered before, one that attacks with alarming stealth and ferocity. Only his grandfather knows what lurks outside in the darkness, but a stroke has left him unable to communicate, forcing Sani to embark upon a journey into the distant past to discover the horrible truth.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a scream. In the remote mountains of Northern Alaska, Dr. Riley Middleton and her team of archeologists discover a burial site containing mummified remains dating to the last ice age. None of them notice the warning carved into the entrance or realize that the tomb had been deliberately sealed from the outside until they’ve already released a virus that turns ordinary people into murderous monsters. But there’s something even more terrifying inside...something ancient...something unspeakably evil.

Alex Hunter - in the mission that turned him from a normal man into the weapon known as the Arcadian - and the elite team of soldiers known as the Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos must enter a hostile country to rescue a defected Chechen researcher from the centre of a country at war. But the HAWCs are not the only ones looking for the rogue scientist and the mysterious package he carries with him. A brutal and relentless killer and his death squad are on the trail, too - and they bring a savagery with them that Hunter and his team have never witnessed before in modern warfare.

Down there, beyond the deepest caves, below the crust and the mantle, there is another world. An old woman locked away in a Russian asylum has a secret - knowledge of a 500-year-old manuscript written by a long-dead alchemist that will show a passage to the mythical centre of the Earth. She knows it’s real because 50 years ago, she and a team travelled there. And only she made it back. Today, caving specialist Mike Monroe leads a crew into the world’s deepest cave in the former Soviet Union.

Deputy Shelby Lake was abandoned as a baby, saved by a stranger who found her in the freezing cold. Now, years later, a young boy is missing - and Shelby is the one who must rescue a child. The only evidence of what happened to 10-year-old Jeremiah Sloan is a bicycle left behind on a lonely road. After a desperate search fails to locate him, the close bonds of Shelby’s hometown begin to fray under the weight of accusations and suspicion. Everyone around her is keeping secrets.

Twenty years ago, ex-beauty queen Didi Storm worked the Vegas strip as a celebrity impersonator. Now, in death, she’s finally getting the publicity she always craved. To the police, it looks like suicide, or a stunt gone wrong. Her estranged daughter, Remmi, knows the answer isn’t so simple. Though dressed in Didi’s clothes and wig, the broken body on the sidewalk isn’t Didi...

Sean Tennant and Molly Winter are living quietly and cautiously in Houston when a troubled, obsessive stranger shatters the safety they have carefully constructed for themselves. Sean is at a shopping mall when Henry Alan Keen pulls out a gun at a store and begins shooting everyone in sight. A former soldier, Sean rushes toward Keen and ends the slaughter with two well-placed shots - becoming a hero with his face plastered across the news. But Sean's newfound notoriety exposes him to the wrath of two men he thought he had left safely in his past.

Ex-marine Arthur Nakai spent years as a member of the Shadow Wolves, an ICE tactical unit tasked by the US government to hunt human traffickers and drug smugglers on the US/Mexico border. He put that life of confronting violence in the darker contours of the desert landscape behind him and settled into a quiet existence in New Mexico with his wife, Sharon, a local TV reporter. But when Sharon goes missing after crossing paths with a serial killer who has just added to his list of young victims, Arthur's calm world is shattered.

Pulled off an undercover assignment, Widow returns home to a small town in Mississippi - a place he tried to forget. Taken to be a worthless drifter by the locals, Widow uses his skills to uncover the truth about his mother's last investigation. What was she looking for? What he discovers is an unsolved mystery of missing girls and townspeople harboring a deadly secret - a secret they'll die to protect.

In the lonely woods around Grizzly Falls, Montana, the first body is discovered, stripped naked and tied to a tree. Alvarez and Pescoli have been hoping for a career-making case, but this is a nightmare. The killer stages car accidents on icy, isolated roads and “rescues” his victims. He toys with them, heals them, earns their trust...before subjecting them to a slow, agonizing death.

Michelle and Cliff Stage bought their isolated vacation cabin in the mountains of North Carolina with hopes of repairing their 18-year marriage. But when Cliff disappears one night searching for the source of a mysterious light in the woods, Michelle’s life will change in unimaginable ways. After the sheriff’s department fails to find him, Michelle scrambles down the same dark mountainside alone, the strange, beckoning light her only guide.

Shaken by the death of his beloved wife and wrestling with powerful personal demons, Professor Gabriel McKenna leaves New York City for New Mexico to claim an inheritance from mysterious distant relatives. He finds something other than a Land of Enchantment. Unseen enemies threaten his life. Old friends turn up and rally to his side. Together they plunge into a lethal struggle for a 19th century treasure, the fabled Lost Adams gold.

Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in.

Twenty years ago, ex-beauty queen Didi Storm worked the Vegas strip as a celebrity impersonator. Now, in death, she’s finally getting the publicity she always craved. To the police, it looks like suicide, or a stunt gone wrong. Her estranged daughter, Remmi, knows the answer isn’t so simple. Though dressed in Didi’s clothes and wig, the broken body on the sidewalk isn’t Didi...

The town of Northfall, Minnesota, will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon. John Frontier returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government.

New Mexico Undersheriff Bill Gastner is presented with a case that appears to have brought big-time crime, including drug gangs, into Posadas County.

There's over a million people in the city of Waterloo. Today, most of them have died, and now they're hungry. Corporal Dan Williamson is caught in the middle of the outbreak, desperately trying to reach his wife who is somewhere amid the urban decay. There are other souls out there, other tales of survival among the horror. Dan will soon learn that the living may prove to be an even bigger threat than the dead.

Feared just as much on the streets as at a crime scene, homicide detective Max Jagger has dedicated his life to one thing: speaking for the dead. Everyone and everything else be damned, including his own demons. During one of the most oppressive heat waves to hit the small, southern town of Berry Springs, the former Navy SEAL is called to a scene where a real estate heiress is found standing over a dead body, holding the murder weapon.

Anthony Award-winning author William Kent Krueger crafts this riveting tale about a small Minnesota town’s ex-sheriff who is having trouble retiring his badge. Cork O’Connor loses his job after being blamed for a tragedy on the local Anishinaabe Indian reservation. But he must set aside his personal demons when a young boy goes missing on the same day a judge commits suicide—and no one but O’Connor suspects foul play.

Meet John Milton. He considers himself an artisan. A craftsman. His trade is murder. Milton is the man the government sends after you when everything else has failed. Ruthless. Brilliant. Anonymous. Lethal. You wouldn't pick him out of a crowd but you wouldn't want to be on his list. In this second dip into his case files (see 1000 Yards for a further novella), Milton is sent to Italy to investigate the death of a colleague from Group 15.

In back alleys and hellholes across the world, ravaged souls and scarred warriors whisper of the Iron Tournament. A savage game of death, pitting living fighters against caged spirits, all for the amusement of a mysterious audience.

In a riveting debut thriller that has drawn comparisons to masters of the genre like Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly, Brian Freeman weaves obsession, sex, and revenge into a story that grips the reader with vivid characters and shocking plot twists from the first minute to the last.

Corporate lawyer Ava Burch has had enough of the big city and the daily grind. She grew up with her father, who raised search-and-rescue dogs, in rural Texas and has moved to the small town of Cuervo to spend time in the dry, rugged wilderness near Big Bend National Park. When she and her dog, Huck, discover an abandoned campsite on a volunteer search-and-rescue mission, she’s perplexed, but she carefully photographs it all the same.

Dallas Phillips refuses to believe her father committed suicide, even though things were tough on his farm and he was deeply in debt. When she hears he'd told a neighbor about an upcoming windfall, she grows suspicious, and her suspicion only deepens when she realizes someone is lurking in the nearby mountains after dark. For help, she turns to Trey Jakes, local police chief - and her former lover. As they begin to investigate, another mystery comes to light.

Secrets and lies can’t stay buried forever in Cedar Valley. In the summer, hikers and campers pack the small Colorado town’s meadows and fields. And in the winter, skiers and snowboarders take over the mountains. Season by season, year after year, time passes, and the lies, like the aspens and evergreens that surround the town, take root and spread deep. Now, someone has uncovered the lies, and it is his murder that continues a chain of events that began almost 40 years ago.

It's been said that all great literature boils down to one of two stories—a man takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. While mystery writers have been successfully using both approaches for generations, there's something undeniably alluring in the nature of a stranger: the uninvited guest, the unacquainted neighbor, the fish out of water. In the newest collection of stories by the Mystery Writers of America, each author weaves a fresh tale surrounding the eerie feeling that comes when a stranger enters our midst, featuring stories by prolific mystery writers.